Category: UK & Europe

Ukraine’s Education Assembly (Освітня асамблея) is officially registered (archived copy) as a “community organization” in Ukraine. On its face, nothing about how they describe themselves sounds particularly worrisome, as seen in the group’s description of itself on their website: “Education Assembly is a project whose goal is comprehensive youth development (…) The project takes the…

Previous reporting by news outlets L’Espresso and Buzzfeed News has revealed that Gianluca Savoini, a close aide to Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, took part in negotiations for clandestine funneling of Russian funding to Italy’s Lega Nord party. The negotiations — the contents of which came to light thanks to an audio recording obtained…

UPDATE: In an article published in Estonian media on August 2, 2019, ICDS chief executive Dmitri Teperik told news website Delfi: “At one point [Yevhen] Karas came to the event, and he stayed there for maybe three hours. We asked a local man whom he was dealing with and he explained who he was…when we…

Today, 17 July 2019, is exactly five years since Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) was shot down by a Buk missile, fired from territory in East Ukraine controlled by Russian-directed militants. After five years it has become clear that the Buk missile launcher that downed the plane came from Russia’s 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade, and…

Authored and researched by Oleksiy Kuzmenko, Michael Colborne Ahead of Ukrainian parliamentary elections on July 21, it is clear from polling data that Ukraine’s far-right groups and their ideas enjoy little popular support among its citizens. Despite this, Ukraine’s government continues to provide funds to notorious far-right extremist groups and their affiliates — including two…

Last week reports appeared online that the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) arrested Ukrainian citizen Vladimir Borysovich Tsemakh (b. 4 July 1961) in connection to the 2014 downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17). Tsemakh was previously known to have been the commander of an air defense unit in Snizhne, the town nearest to the Buk…

In the first part of this “GRU Globetrotters” series, Bellingcat and its investigative partner The Insider teamed up with BBC Newsnight to trace the London movements and potential role of Russian GRU officer Denis Sergeev during the time that the Skripals were poisoned in Salisbury. The research was made possible thanks to telephone metadata which…

In November 2018, Bellingcat wrote about two photographs related to child abuse crimes – photographs which were geolocated to Shenzhen in China. This investigation was crowdsourced by Europol as part of their Stop Child Abuse campaign that has been running since 2017. Images are shared on their website with the goal to identify the objects…

In a series of previous investigations, Bellingcat and the Insider identified the two key suspects in the Novichok poisoning of Sergey and Yulia Skripal, and the subsequent poisoning death of Dawn Sturgess. We identified the two suspects, who travelled under the fake identities of Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, as Russian military intelligence (GU/GRU) officers…

Sunday, the day of the annual KyivPride March of Equality, was a bit of a crappy day for many anti-LGBT extremists in Ukraine. KyivPride Recap After a week of homophobic messages, violent threats, and even physical attacks on more than a dozen KyivPride participants, anti-LGBT forces in Ukraine were unable to slow down the March…